


neither fish nor flesh

by voksen



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Javert Survives, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rating May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-31
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-25 05:46:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/949337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voksen/pseuds/voksen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Valjean rescues Javert from the Seine, but it is an act that raises far more questions than it answers.</p><p>  <i>They breach the surface again just before it is too late. His first deep gasp leaves him dizzy enough to offset the pain and then he is panting, his eyes shut, mouth open - this is what Valjean wants, he thinks, but he will soon find that Javert is not so easily thrown from the trail as that once he has set himself on it.  "What is it," he says between breaths, forcing his eyes open again to stare down at the water, though he does not yet try to look back again, "what is it, Valjean, that you do not want me to see?  What have you done?"</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	neither fish nor flesh

Javert falls. The step had been the work of an instant and the fall should hardly take longer; the distance between bridge and river is not so great as the divide between heaven and hell. But somehow time slows as he tumbles, his mind racing against the inevitability of what he has done, as if even in casting away his life he cannot help but cling to the last seconds that remain. He sees everything in clear and terrible detail: the black waters of the river, the cold gray stone of the water weir beneath it promising a quick death, quicker than he deserves - he twists and tumbles in the air, his body as far from his control as his thoughts. The sky is black and starless. The bridge is falling away from him, farther and farther. It will be soon. He tenses despite himself, bracing for the fatal impact. He will keep his eyes open until the last - he will watch -

Something takes him in the side with incredible force, knocking the wind from him. He has only a moment of shrieking animal panic - it is not stone that has hit him, it is something else, something warm, it is the flames of hell - and then the water has him, cold and smothering. He kicks out in instinct despite the pain that shoots instantly through his ribs; finds his feet tangled in something that twists and curves sinuously, inhumanly. The gibbering fear rises up again and this time Javert cannot fight it; there is a hot iron band across his chest and water rushing in his lungs and he chokes and is gone.

When he struggles back, coughing madly, riverwater pouring helplessly and disgustingly from his open mouth, he is still in the river and the strange hot grip is still tight about his chest, holding his head above the water. He is moving steadily, soundlessly upriver, against the current. His vision fades dangerously again, his mind quailing at impossibility. He looks down. Underneath the masking blur of the water, beneath the reflection of the clouds, there is an arm about his chest, a dark jacket of unknowable color, barely recognizable. There is no sound of swimming, only the quiet lapping of the waves. There is no hot breath on his neck. He coughs again, turns his head to vomit more bile and water, catches the glimpse of a broad epauletted shoulder. He cannot make sense of it; his head spins, he is fallen into a world he cannot understand even more than he had believed before he stepped free--

"Don't look at me," a voice says. It is too low, it is scratched and strange, it is nevertheless unmistakably the voice of Jean Valjean. Javert raises his hand - his arms are pinned to his side by the embrace that holds him, but he can still move so much - and touches the arm at his chest. He remembers Valjean in his stolen guardsman's uniform, cornering him in the alley, the martingale choking him even then: dark blue with red epaulettes.

"Valjean," he says. "How is it--" He cannot comprehend it. There is still no sound of breathing aside from his own labored half-dead gasps; he holds his breath for a few seconds to confirm this and hears only the Seine and in the echoing deafened distance the noise of Paris wakening to bloody streets.

Valjean's arm tightens about him, lifts him a bit further free of the water and he gasps at the renewed pain in his ribs and breathes again unwillingly. They pass a boat moored to the bank and continue on unceasingly, a smooth rhythm. He should be able to feel Valjean kicking as he swims. He feels nothing. For a moment he wonders if he had perhaps snapped his spine in the fall, if he is paralyzed and broken, and then his memory returns to him the impossible curl of something monstrous about his legs as the water rose up. He retches again and produces nothing; pushing down his nausea he slowly, deliberately shifts his toes in his sodden boots and finds that it is quite possible.

"I don't understand," he admits to the same man for the second time in one night. It is unprecedented - but it is Valjean, and so it is in some ludicrous way only right that the unexpected should be expected. Valjean has made an absurd career of ruining Javert's expectations.

As he speaks, as he breathes, Valjean slackens his grasp again; Javert's breath catches as he sinks back into the water, though it is more from the shifting of pressure over his bruised and broken side than from the way the river rises up his chest. In any event Valjean does not let him slip too far. A long awkward moment passes; in the silence Javert does not doubt Valjean had heard him, but neither has Valjean ever been stingy with explanations and excuses.

There is a first time for everything. "I did not intend that you should," Valjean mumbles eventually. He sounds tired. Javert supposes he has every right to be: producing miracle after miracle in the span of a single night must exhaust even a saint. But no; he puts away the sarcasms and tries to gather his scattered thoughts.

Before he has managed it entirely, they pass under another bridge and the shadow swallows his sight entirely. It is uncannily like that black moment on top of the parapet just before he had stepped off - but there is still the pressure of Valjean's arm and the heat of his chest against Javert's shoulders, and then the shadow of stone is gone and they are beneath the cloudy sky again. "Where exactly do you plan to go?" he asks. They are still in the middle of the river, still swimming - they are swimming - he has always known Valjean was an unnaturally excellent swimmer, this is merely more evidence, a confirmation, that is all - steadily, quickly eastwards.

"I --" Valjean swallows roughly. Javert can feel the motion against his back, can sense the uneasy guilty tension in Valjean's skin despite the clothing and the water between them, and his instincts seize on the uncertainty like a dog at a bone: Valjean is hiding something.

But the puzzle had already been complete: the good man, the convict, the outlaw redeemed beyond all possibility and sense. This new information is an extra piece, a rough-edged chip that does not fit. It is a key to a lock that does not exist. For a long terrible second he considers looking away and leaving this stone unturned, shutting his eyes to the evidence, and then before he has decided Valjean continues.

"Back," Valjean says. "I will see you to a hospital--" Javert makes an irritated dismissive noise that Valjean ignores, "--and I will see that the boy reached home safely. Then I will say goodbye to Cosette..." His voice weakens slightly and Javert is struck by a sudden hunger to see his face, to pull this new secret from him. He twists in Valjean's hold, ignoring the scrape of his ribs, and turns his head.

" _Don't_ ," Valjean says again and when Javert does not listen or obey he dives suddenly, dragging Javert under with him. 

The water closes over them with a cold slap and Javert barely manages to hold his breath through the shock of it against his face. He feels Valjean's other arm come up to clasp him tighter, feels the pang of his broken rib again, and the swift rush of water as somehow, impossibly, Valjean keeps swimming - swims faster yet, by the drag of the water. Javert grips at Valjean's arms again, but they are immovable; he tries to struggle, but he might as well try to lift the world. His air escapes in a stream of bubbles. He thinks, once, how easy it would be to drown as he had intended and then banishes the idea, keeping his mouth grimly shut until his lungs ache and his hands fist in Valjean's sleeves.

They breach the surface again just before it is too late. His first deep gasp leaves him dizzy enough to offset the pain and then he is panting, his eyes shut, mouth open - this is what Valjean wants, he thinks, but he will soon find that Javert is not so easily thrown from the trail as that once he has set himself on it. "What is it," he says between breaths, forcing his eyes open again to stare down at the water, though he does not yet try to look back again, "what is it, Valjean, that you do not want me to see? What have you done?"

That there is something, he has no doubt. The lock must exist, or Valjean - gentle Valjean, who rescues lost boys and strayed Inspectors alike and cannot bear to shoot a man who wants to kill him any more than one who wants to ruin him - would not go to such lengths to hide it. He must find it. He must know the truth: it is all he has. _What_ it could be - that, as yet, he has no answers for; only a pile of strange coincidences and impossibilities, a puzzle of shadows behind the completed image of the saint.

Valjean gives a tiny strangled laugh. "You are a hound, Javert," he says. "Is it not enough to arrest me?" They have passed out of the middle of the city; there are more boats moored along the banks now and Valjean at last turns aside out of the middle of the river and towards one of them.

If Javert were capable of being shaken, he perhaps might have been: it is after all his business only to arrest Valjean and it is his failure in this respect that had driven him to the river in the first place. But the world is still unstable and crumbling despite the unshifting and unwanted anchor of Valjean's presence and without solid ground to stand on he does not buckle under the blow, although his mind is sore where it hits from the effort of doubt and overthinking. "No," he says. There is no value in prevarication here. "It is not. What are you hiding now?" 

He checks Valjean's name before it can come from his mouth again: it is too small a step from _Valjean_ to _24601_ when such suspicions are on him and he does not want to consider the idea that he has been wrong a second time - or is this the third? Everything to do with Jean Valjean is a godforsaken twist of knots with no free ends and Javert is losing patience in picking at it endlessly only to have it snatched from his hands.

They come level with the boat. It is a small flat punt tied to a dock that is really more of a pole; some washerwoman's work, no doubt. There is a sheet of waxed sailcloth strapped over it, perhaps to protect from the rain, and without answering Javert or indeed saying another word Valjean takes one arm from around him and strips the cloth away. Javert stares blankly.

"I will pay them back," Valjean says in stead of answering Javert's question. He sounds almost embarrassed.

"You are going to," Javert starts, and then they have passed the boat, the waxcloth bunched up in Valjean's arm against him, and have reached the bank. He cannot say the closeness of land is not a relief, no matter that he had never expected to touch it again. "... to steal, right in front of me."

Valjean hefts him up - his ribs complain yet again - and almost tosses him up onto land. Javert manages to catch himself with his hands and his knees before his face can slap into the mud. He is soggy, he is soaked, he smells of dank river water, he is ridiculously alive. He stands again at the fork in the road he had thought to avoid by quitting the path altogether; he stands with a recidivist thief who insists on changing his soul as often as he changes his name. It seems as if every path is blocked; unless he somehow suddenly sprouts wings to fly away Javert does not know what he is meant to do.

There is a long slapping splash from behind him, much louder than the squelch he had produced when Valjean tossed him up into the mud, and Javert climbs wearily to his feet, a hand protectively over his ribs. Sitting in wet wool on a riverbank until he develops pneumonia or cholera or some such thing is not a way he would choose to die even to avoid the horns of the unrelenting dilemma at his back. 

Speaking of which, he has had enough and more than enough of being manhandled for the night; he turns, deliberately, decisively, and looks down at Valjean, who is--

Who is half-sitting on the riverbank, wrapping the stolen sheet about his waist like some sort of primitive skirt. His bare legs stick out below the cloth, pale in the darkness, and his unshod feet have black river mud squished between the toes--

Javert jerks his gaze back up as if scalded, fixing his eyes on Valjean's face. Valjean is deliberately not looking at him. It seems as if Valjean intends to look everywhere _but_ at him. He wants to say Valjean's name very badly. "What," he says instead, "is the meaning of this? I will have an answer. Now."

Valjean stares up at him with the rabbity look he remembers from the hospital in Montreuil, the look of a man who knows he is caught out, that the teeth of the law are only inches from his neck. Javert's fingers itch for the blade of a sword he does not have: Valjean had not worn that look for long...

He flicks the memory away. In Montreuil Valjean had requested three days and Javert had denied him; tonight he has requested what - three hours? - and Javert in letting him take the schoolboy and go had in a way already acquiesced to the demand. No matter the likeness of the expressions the situations are not equivalent. "You look as if you expect me to arrest you on the spot," he says. Even if he had intended to, if the certainty of years had not fled from him earlier in the night, he thinks he would have a hard time of it. Valjean is slippery as an eel and Javert's handcuffs lie somewhere at the bottom of the Seine.

"You're not going to?" Valjean asks. He begins to stand, hands on the sailcloth to hold up his makeshift skirt, and, barefoot, slips in the mud.

Javert lunges forward and catches him by the collar mostly on reflex. They waver precariously on the river's edge and almost topple backwards into the water once again - and then Valjean grabs him by the shoulders and digs his feet in just long enough for Javert to take a quick step backward and balance them out.

Valjean's eyes are wide and very dark as he looks down into Javert's face, his breathing quick and too shallow. This is fear, Javert thinks fleetingly, this is fear, but it is not fear of the law. This is a look he has never seen on the face of Jean Valjean - on the face of Monsieur le Maire - on the face of the Parisian gentleman. He releases Valjean's collar slowly, feeling as if he has to pry his fingers away with sheer will. It is as though, despite his earlier resolutions, once he has him caught his body is somehow reluctant to allow Valjean the chance to escape again. Javert's eyes flick from Valjean's face to his hands where they are cupped around Javert's shoulders and Valjean removes them quickly with an awkward hemming cough. His skirt is sagging slightly from the struggle and he tucks at it some more to preserve his modesty. Javert does not watch.

"No," he says. "I believe you said you had things to do."

"Oh," Valjean says. He blinks several times and smiles quickly, nervously. Javert notices it does not touch his eyes. When Madeleine had smiled it nearly always had. "Yes. Of course. The hospital. Mar-- the boy. And Cosette."

Javert turns from him and walks up the bank to the road; when he looks back, Valjean is following him - more slowly, careful now of where he places his feet in the mud. There are streaks of it up his shins, dark lines with oddly sharp edges like inksplotches on a clumsy writer's hands. He looks utterly ridiculous. Javert closes his eyes briefly. "No."

"No?" Valjean echoes, picking his way up to stand in the road beside him. "I don't--"

Javert raises a hand before Valjean can say he does not understand. "Look at yourself," he says. Valjean does and Javert feels almost in control again. He gestures at Valjean's dripping jacket, at the makeshift skirt. "If you go near a hospital like that they will try to admit you as a lunatic. They might well be right to do so."

"But," Valjean says.

"Or they might insist that I arrest you for the obvious theft of that jacket. And there they would be almost right."

"Javert--"

"Go home, Valjean," Javert says. "Put on some clothes, for God's sake."

It is still quite dark; the streetlamps do not quite reach the shadowed edge where they stand, but Javert can see the flush creeping up Valjean's face. He finds that he likes it: it is proof that his words still have effect, that all power has not yet been stripped from his hands and thoughts. It is a reversal of Valjean's own actions - that awful pity he had shown Javert at the barricade, the reprieve he had not wanted - and Javert feels a shred of savage pleasure in refusing it, in paying it back, in throwing it in his face.

Valjean does not let it go. Javert suspects he is congenitally incapable of making things easy for him. "Your side," he says, and this time bulls on when Javert attempts to silence him again. "Your ribs, Javert, I heard them crack, when - when you - when I --"

"When you what," Javert says, leaning in slightly. He does not think it is squeamishness about what he had clearly been attempting that stops Valjean's glib tongue up like this; or not only that, at any rate.

"When I caught you," Valjean finishes lamely. His mouth flattens into an odd moue. "You might have died," he says.

He knows Valjean is not stupid. That is clearly apparent; has always been, even when he had showed merely more low animal cunning than most cons. "What did you think I meant in stepping off a bridge?"

"You might have slipped," Valjean offers. Even to Javert, who has - he hates to admit it even to himself - been taken in by Valjean's lies more than once it seems transparent.

"You know I did not," he counters.

Valjean grimaces again. "And so if - if I go home, if I do not take you to a hospital..."

That Valjean for some strange reason known only to himself cares for Javert's life he cannot deny: he spared it at the barricade and now he has outright saved it. Once Javert could accept as a mercy, but a thing repeated has meaning. He crosses his arms; the pose allows him to feel at his ribs surreptitiously. They are cracked at least, he can tell that much from the pain beneath his fingers, but he does not think they are broken too badly; he has been hurt worse before. A hospital will do nothing for him except take his money in exchange for telling him to rest and to refrain from overwork.

Suddenly he sees Valjean's meaning. It is not concern for his injuries - at least not the injury to his body. "You think to leave me in some doctor's hands to keep me from jumping again as soon as I've seen your back."

"Am I wrong?" Valjean says. His voice is not quite challenging, not quite pleading, but a strange mixture of both, a supplication with lashings of authority that disarms Javert of the tattered and wounded pride he had been gathering to himself. "Javert, am I wrong? I cannot see you die here in front of me any more than I could have shot you before - any more than I could have gone with you and left the boy to die of his wounds. I am not that man!"

"So you have said."

"I am not," Valjean repeats. He swipes a hand across his face, pushing wet strands of his hair back from his forehead and sending a stream of water dripping slowly down the side of his neck. "How many times must I tell you I have changed?"

"I suppose you will say it as often as you care to say it," Javert says. "But you need not repeat it on my account. I know you have changed." The knowledge of it is written in his skin, in the burns left by the rope at wrist and throat, in the ache of his side, in every inch of his body that had not met bullet or knife blade. It is still painful to say the words out loud; bitter to confess his own sins expecting no understanding or absolution. Even sainthood goes only so far. And yet there is still the mystery; the mystery that Valjean is going to every extent to avoid explaining, even to having conversations that obviously discomfit him.

"You have a strange way of showing it."

"We would not be standing here if I did not think you had," Javert returns pointedly. "I would have shot you as I told you I would." It seems unbelievable that Valjean does not understand; that anyone could not understand the incredible breach in order that has occurred and the impossibilities that flow forth from it unchecked. But apparently he does not. He laughs shortly. "Or I would be somewhere downstream and you would be free."

He sees it when that word - _free_ \- strikes home; there is a little stillness in Valjean's face, the look of a wolf confronted with the cage. "I gave you my address at the barricades," Valjean says quietly. "I knew then that you would follow me. Or I thought you would."

"Because you are truly eager to return to prison." Valjean does not move; more to the point he does not deny it. His eyes slide away from Javert again. "You are," says Javert. "You were. You really did think to be arrested." He has been walking forwards towards Valjean without quite realizing it; suddenly they are face to face and Valjean's guilty eyes are on him again. Javert remembers Valjean being a better liar than this; as Madeleine surely he had not been so obvious. Had Javert been so blind then or is it just that more of the story is plain to him than it had been before? "And you pulled me out thinking that I would arrest you on the spot."

"Well--"

"Or as soon as you had had your three hours' reprieve." He wants to grab Valjean by the collar again, to shake him until his teeth rattle, to save him not from the river this time but from his own damned foolishness; to put him out of _Javert's_ misery.

Before he can give in to temptation there is the sound of an idle whistle and stumbling footsteps from the row of buildings across the street from where they stand, and Javert glances over as a drunk wends his unsteady, oblivious way past.

Of course they are not the only two souls alive and awake in Paris, though in the dark of the river it had seemed almost so. The hours are ticking by; soon the sun will rise, the streets will fill; Valjean, who seems to have left all his sense behind at the barricade if not sometime before that, will still be standing here half-naked and barefoot. And why? Because he refuses _not to be arrested_ after having proven that he does not deserve to be arrested; that sending him back to prison would be a greater injustice than keeping him from it. It is a great cosmic joke written in blood and the punchline is Javert. He may be going mad after all, because he almost begins to find it funny.

"You cannot go chasing after your revolutionary dressed like that, either," he says. The boy is probably dead anyway but having Valjean appear like this on his doorstep will certainly not help matters if he is not.

Valjean blushes again; this close it is quite obvious. Despite it he makes an obvious effort to compose himself and when he speaks most of the nerves have been smoothed from his voice and replaced by a strange earnestness: "I am not - _eager_ \- to be arrested. I am not eager to return to prison. Who could be? To go back into the mill beneath the grindstone, to the plank and the lash and the galley. But I have done my duty and I must keep on even when it is difficult - even when it is something I do not want to do, when it seems the hardest, cruelest choice. But when it spares another - when it spares an innocent from torment that they do not deserve--"

"Enough," Javert says. To stand here and listen to a half-naked Valjean lecture about duty in the face of innocence when he has just ruined Javert's attempt to spare _him_ the fate he does not deserve - it would surely exhaust a better man than he. " _Enough_ , Valjean. If you will not leave it be, I will go with you. You can get dressed without worrying I will find my way back into the river; you can speak to this Cosette of yours; we will go and find the corpse of your schoolboy." Valjean makes a wordless noise of protest that he does not pay the slightest attention to. "And then," he continues, "I will have an explanation out of you - a full explanation - and I will decide what to do after that." If he suspects his decision will remain the one which Valjean attempted to keep him from making even with the extra time, he does not say it.

Valjean's mouth works for a moment with no words emerging; his gaze flickers from Javert to the Seine and back; his fingers twist nervously at the cloth about his hips; he finally nods. There is, Javert thinks, more defeat than there should be in the gesture. That this secret of Valjean's that leads him to wandering about the city half-clothed is worse than the prospect of a life in prison he has trouble believing, and yet Valjean seems to take it harder. It promises to be the sort of long and twisting report not appropriate for hearing on an open street, though even with the latest strangeness of the night he feels incapable of reconciling Valjean with depravity deserving of Toulon.

It takes less time than Javert had expected to locate a fiacre willing to carry them despite their thoroughly disreputable appearance; the river had at least done for the sewer muck on Valjean along with his pants and shoes. Owing to the latter he does not bother to ask whether Valjean has money for the fare but pays it himself; he supposes the driver cannot be blamed for asking the fare in advance despite the respect his uniform ought to command.

Once they are settled on the bench Javert begins to feel weariness creeping up on him, the small comfort of a velvet cushion doing what hours of pain had not. Rue de l'Homme-Armé is some minutes away yet - he had not quite realized how far upriver they had come - and with every turn of the wheel his bones feel heavier. "You went out of your way," he says to Valjean.

Valjean glances up and then away again. "I thought it better that no one saw us in the river - or coming out of it," he replies. Now that they are moving he seems less consumed with the passion of duty he had briefly shown on the riverbank; he looks nearly as old and tired as Javert feels. 

Javert waits a moment to see if Valjean will take the rest of the bait, but he does not - at least not in words; the brief eloquence that had taken him up when he had been speaking of duty and Toulon has gone. In the shadows of the carriage Valjean's face is carved in deep unhappy lines that darken further as Javert watches. This is not unusual for a condemned man (for so he imagines Valjean casts himself) but if Javert acknowledges that of him then he will be allowing Valjean to push him down one road of injustice instead of the other, instead of lingering at the crossroads for these last hours of reprieve. He will not; he cannot. "And why did you come back at all?"

He notes as if from a far away distance that when Valjean flinches he takes no pleasure in it. It is weighted and added to the long and complicated mental casefile he has kept since the first day he saw Valjean, years and a lifetime ago, locked in his line, soaked to the waist in seawater and looking as if he could pull a ship into drydock by his own strength alone. He had enjoyed the respect he was due from Valjean then; he had enjoyed the small traces of weakness he had found when he had been searching out the con in Madeleine. Now, even though Valjean seems determined to chain himself again, there is nothing; the thrill of the hunt is gone completely from his instincts. If Javert had needed yet another proof of his innocence, a seal on his pardon, here it is. He does not need it; he does not want it. It would be easier to be wrong than to be impossibly, impartially just.

Valjean's voice when he finally speaks up is low but cuts into Javert's thoughts regardless. "I recognized that look," he says. He is staring down at his clasped hands, shifting them, pressing one with another and then reversing them, as if he were cold. "The look you wore when I carried him past you. When you did not shoot me after all."

Javert remembers the queasy sensation of vertigo and massing despair all too well; it had been a greater height from the perch of confidence than from the Pont-au-Change. He had not realized that it had been so obvious on his face that Valjean had seen it in him; the thought that he had been so transparent - that Valjean has seen or guessed so much - is discomfiting. It prickles irritation over his skin and wariness and something smaller that he tells himself is not fear. "Explain yourself," he says.

"The way it feels," Valjean says - slowly, at first, as if he has to search for each word in its turn, "when there isn't anything left but emptiness, when you do not even have a name, when there is not even a number. When everything you have learned to know is suddenly taken away and nothing allows for a replacement. When you are freed from your chains only to find that the world is a manacle. The way it feels to look for yourself, and find someone else. Or to find nothing at all." By the end he is talking too fast, as if the words are chasing themselves from his tongue, like a corked bottle shaken too hard, and Javert is listening with growing disbelief.

Valjean glances up at Javert when he comes to this and then, upon meeting his eyes, as quickly looks away again. "And so," he says, "I took him to the street; I found a carriage that would agree to take him, I paid. I had some money with me. I sent him home and then I came back because I knew--"

"You know nothing," Javert says. He is not entirely sure he knows what he feels himself at this moment; he can still feel the void beneath him no less deep and daunting for the solid bench of the fiacre and the cobblestones jolting below the wheels, but beside that, slowly building beneath the incredulities he has suffered, is a hot thread of anger. Javert seizes on it like a rope thrown to a drowning man. Valjean oversteps himself again, he thinks, and it grows hotter in his hands. They have had this argument before, or one very close to it. That, too, had ended in water. The similarities plague him. "Do not think to compare yourself to me. We are--"

He cannot say they are nothing alike without lying. Valjean has by means unfathomable raised himself from perdition, from the base scum he had been; has fallen and risen again out of all order. The reminder that the inversion of the world goes beyond the immediate problem of ensuring Valjean's continued freedom dries Javert's mouth but he forges on anyway. "We are not the same." That at least is not a lie.

"We are men," Valjean says. His voice is full of a terrible thing that is not quite pity; there is too much -- too much _bitterness_ in it. Javert could not have stood pity; would have raged at sympathy. This undefinable thing confuses him; it is yet another thing about Valjean that resists order and sense. He should no longer be surprised by this. "All men can despair," Valjean continues. "I know the signs of it better than many. And then I saw you walking on the bridge and I knew I had been right."

"I have walked on bridges before," Javert says. It sounds like a defense. He has walked the edge all his life and it is only Valjean who had made it at last too narrow to balance; Valjean who now seeks to throw him off the edge again after catching him at the bottom. It is a sickening dizzying tumble to which the rapids still seem preferable.

"Not like that."

"Always like that," he mutters, though he does not expect Valjean to understand; in this they are dissimilar, at least, though it is cold comfort to think so. In Jean the Jack there had been no signs of reformation; looking back to Montreuil he can discern no sign that Valjean had been any less than a saint already. There had been the miracles of charity, the alms - the most Madeleine had been guilty of was too much of that damnable pity. In retrospect even the businesses of the whore and the apple-thief are cast in a better light; Valjean the martyr even then. There seems to have been no middle ground for him, no thin line between heaven and hell. Perhaps he rules in both, after all.

"Javert," Valjean says. At the sound of his name Javert shifts his glare back to Valjean, who flinches slightly - gratifyingly - under the weight of it. "I do not pretend to know what --" he unclasps his hands finally, flattens them on the bench at either side of them; the cessation of movement is a small relief in the back of Javert's mind, "-- what happened. What sent you to the bridge. I cannot guess it. But that is why I came back for you."

Of course he does not know; he had already admitted as much when he as much as presented himself to be immediately arrested. Still the irony of it is too much. Javert shakes his head wordlessly.

With a clatter of hooves and a squeak of harness the carriage draws to a halt. Looking out the window, Javert finds that they have arrived at the address he had given the driver - the address Valjean had given him. Valjean is gazing out the window at one of the upper apartments with a strange longing written across his face; at last he gives a tiny sigh, almost inaudible, and opens the carriage door to step out into the street. Javert follows.

It is only after he has closed the door behind him that he realizes there was no need for him to get out at all; he had followed Valjean entirely on instinct. Before he can attempt to sort out why, Valjean, one hand again on his skirt, turns back to him.

"Please come in," Valjean says. "You do not need to wait in the street."

Javert thinks sourly that Valjean is probably only attempting to keep him from attempting to escape, but they have already made enough of a scene; if he protests he does not want to think of what Valjean will invent next. And, too, he is too tired to argue over things so inconsequential. One hour or three hours, it makes no difference. "Wait for us," he tells the driver, who had been eying Valjean's half-bare legs again, but nods when Javert addresses him.

The stairs are winding and many. Too many. Valjean goes up first, as he had neglected to tell Javert which apartment of the building they sought. Javert spends too long staring at his back, at the bedraggled river-spoiled jacket. He climbs too closely; if he falls back a pace or two he finds himself looking instead at the sailcloth and to be reminded of Valjean's minor sins only focuses his mind the more clearly on the good he has done - is doing - will no doubt continue to do endlessly into the future if he does not manage to force Javert's hand to injustice.

By the time Valjean finally stops on the top landing Javert's head aches as badly from trying not to think as his joints ache from exertion, abuse, and lack of sleep. His temple throbs where there the cell leader had split his skull with his own nightstick. He leans back against the banister, resting his weight on it, and watches Valjean fumble fruitlessly with the doorknob, then reach for his pockets and encounter only skirt. If he did not hurt so much he might smile at it.

Valjean pats at the sides of his borrowed jacket and again comes up with nothing. His hands, Javert notes with detached interest, are shaking slightly; they only steady as he fists them, raises one, knocks at his own door. When no one answers he knocks again, his head bowing as he stands before it. He looks again the criminal shamed in the face of the law, though with Valjean's back to him he cannot see his face.

The door does not open. They wait in silence in the stairwell for seconds that stretch into ages. Valjean makes to knock again but just before he can apply knuckles to wood there is a tiny sound of shuffling in the echoing quiet and he stops his hand.

"Hello?" a voice says from beyond the shut door. It is a young woman's voice; not frightened, perhaps uncertain.

"Cosette," Valjean says. "Please open the door."

"Papa?"

"Yes," he says. He flattens his hand and touches the door lightly with his fingertips in a curiously tender gesture, then drops his arm.

The lock clicks open; the door opens just wide enough for the girl to peek out without Javert being able to see in. She is clever. Valjean raised her; Valjean raised her from the gutter. Javert closes his eyes.

When he opens them again seconds later the door stands open and Cosette is grasping Valjean by the arms and exclaiming over him. All he can recall of her from the mess in the square when Thenardier had set him on the trail again is a flurry of impressions; a pale bonnet, a dark dress. He had been more concerned with Valjean's reappearance.

She looks nothing like her mother, if this is truly the whore's daughter; he remembers dark hair cropped as short as a convict's, a ragged red dress, bleak eyes, a hollow face, blood on some gentleman's face and red beneath her nails; he remembers the way she had spat in Monsieur le Maire's face; he remembers the way Valjean had been standing over her deathbed in the hospital when Javert had tracked him there at last.

The girl mothering at Valjean is short and slim but that is where the resemblance ends. She is wearing a white nightdress underneath a wrap; her braided hair is long and fair; she looks like she does not know the meaning of the word _hate_. Yet it must be her.

Valjean is making sundry apologies and no explanations; at length Cosette looks past him and sees Javert standing there at the railing; she glances between the two of them with apparent confusion, then draws Valjean inside and steps back out of the doorway.

For a moment he thinks she is going to shut the door and then she is looking at him again. "Monsieur," she says. "Please come in."

Javert does. Behind him the lock clicks home again as he looks about the hallway he finds himself in. It is simple but not spartan; it is not surprising. He had imagined this scene many times before: running Valjean to ground like this, seizing him at last; in the street, in some alley, in his home. In none of these plans had he been invited in.

Valjean and his miserable excuse for clothing disappear around a doorway at the end of the brief hall and something in Javert relaxes an inch when he is out of sight at last. He still has not worked out how he will keep Valjean from insisting on being arrested but now that he does not have to look at him, surely, it will be easier to think.

Cosette steps out from behind Javert, tucking flyaway hair behind her ears. Her wrap is close about her in an attempt at propriety that only makes Javert uncomfortably more aware that he is standing in a hall with a young girl - with Valjean's daughter - in her nightclothes. "Would you like tea?" she asks.

He opens his mouth to say 'no' but she is already past him and hurrying down the hall. Javert, out of sorts, follows her to the kitchen as he had followed Valjean out of the carriage.

She is already filling the kettle when he arrives after her. He thinks of asking where their housekeeper is, for surely they have one; Valjean understands such small proprieties or he would not have stayed hidden nearly so long. But then his eyes fall on a small table and pair of chairs tucked away into the corner of the kitchen; at the sight his body doubles its complaints and Javert decides he does not give a damn about the fate of Jean Valjean's housekeeper.

He sits. The chair is hard wood and not comfortable; the velvet-covered cushions of the fiacre had been far better. Cosette's slippered feet make quiet shushing noises; the stove crackles mutedly. The kettle is not yet singing, but it seems there will be tea whether he wants it or not. Perhaps he and Valjean will sit across this little table and drink it together; it is no more absurd than anything else.

When Javert closes his eyes, he means only to rest them for a moment as he had done in the hall. The night outside had been warm and close; Valjean's kitchen is warmer still. The scent of the river, soaked into his clothes and his skin, slowly fades away.


End file.
